Kauai Beach Guide

Alex and his team came through with flying colors! I am very pleased that I chose them to do my app. They took my design ideas to a level that exceeded my expectations. The graphics constantly receive compliments. The interface is very user-friendly, and everything I had hoped for and more. Challenges and obstacles were met and well-handled. I look forward to working with them again in the future.

Vicki Sterne

February 20, 2012

The Kauai Beach Guide offers comprehensive information to help users find the safest, most tourist-friendly beaches on the island. Komarov Mobile helped Vicki Sterne, a Hawaiian entrepreneur and experienced tour guide, convert her new guidebook into an iPhone app. We architected, designed, and developed the app, guiding our client from the initial idea all the way through to Apple’s app store.

Main Screen

Safety First

Depending on the weather and time of year, the same beach can at times be calm and friendly, or dangerous and even deadly.

An average of ten people drown or disappear on Kauai each year, and of these seven are tourists. Our primary goal was to create an app that would help first- and second-time visitors to Kauai make more informed beach choices, be aware of weather and ocean conditions, and have a safer vacation.

Up-to-date information when users need it.

Kauai Beach Guide uses daily reports from NOAAand Kauaiexplorer.com to display the most up-to-date surf report, weather information, and important warnings and advisories.

Kauai has more then sixty beaches, and the app focuses on twentyfive of them.

Beaches were carefully selected by the author and color-coded for safety.

When in doubt, don’t go out!

Despite popular belief, sharks are not the main cause of offshore accidents. The deadliest and much less dramatic threat to swimmers and snorkelers are rip currents.

All water that comes in with the waves has to go out. Rip currents are the water escape routes. Unprepared
swimmers can exhaust themselves and drown trying to outswim the rip current.

It’s much wiser to ride it out, and then try to escape to the sides. The best strategy, however, is not to go in the water in the first place.

Welcome Screen

Welcomes new users and briefly explains the color-coding used in the app.

Contemporary Tourist Guide

The app is more comprehensive and organized than many tourist guides. Beach information, photos, directions, history, available facilities, and the best activities to do at each beach—all this information is easily discoverable and readily available.

Perfect App Size

According to Apple’s AppStore standards you can download apps that are up to 20MB large using either your cellphone data/3g or WiFi.

If the app is larger then 20MB you have to use WIFI only to download it.

Kauai Beach Guide is optimized fit 20 MB limit, so Kauai visitors can download the app using 3g network. This is particularly important for that type of context and audience: we didn’t want tourists to run around the island or the airport looking for a WIFI hot spot not protected with a password.

Beach Info Screen

Technology

Many apps that have maps use Google maps, Bing maps, or another map service. We chose a narrower path for more accuracy. Google maps may be great technology, but for the small island of Kauai, they have poorly detailed maps.

Standard Maps Just Didn’t Work for Us

Neither Google nor Bing nor Yahoo maps of Kauai worked for us. They were either too detailed or too plain. None of them allowed the user to see what we wanted him to see: the details that are important when selecting a beach to visit today.

Native Experience for Custom Maps

The map in the Kauai Beach Guide supports pinch gestures and works exactly like a native Google maps app, with the only difference that it is not one.

Kauai Map

Custom-designed by Komarov Mobile information designers, the map is available in eight sizes: ×1, ×2, ×4, ×8, and retina-display resolutions that are doubled ×1 to ×8. The highest map resolution is 6400×7040 px (×8).

Aloha Info Screen

Hawaii has beautiful coral reefs and unique animals, among them Hawaiian monkseals, green sea turtles, Hawaiian dolphins, and humpback whales. We wanted app users to get the most out of their visit to Kauai by providing additional information about the local marine life and attractions.

Hawaiian Monk Seals

Pictograms

Swim

Snorkel

Lifeguard

Restrooms

Shower

Hiking

Picnic Shelter

Pavilion

Playground

Bodyboard

Child Friendly

Campground

Picnic Table

Application Icon

The application icon is a very important marketing tool. People often make a decision on whether to download an app just by looking at its icon in the App Store.

To encourage those downloads, the icon needs to be visually appealing and polished, as well as briefly convey the app’s main purpose. We designed the Kauai Beach Guide icon to be all these things.